Jolt Awards: The Best Testing Tools

Today's competitive product edge is the user interface. With Web, desktop and mobile applications attempting to present more and more information in each page, being able to effectively test that interface gives a development team its own competitive edge.

Ranorex Studio 4 enables testing access to the behavior of every screen object with a sophisticated record and replay editor. It enables full checking of complex mouse clicks and other screen gestures on desktop, Web-based, or mobile presentations. Test data can be hard coded into the tests or can be derived from external Excel spreadsheets. Importantly, commonly occurring test sequences can be saved in an easily maintained repository to be later cut-and-pasted into new test cases for other applications. Ranorex integrates with Microsoft Test Manager, as well as some other continuous integration products such as HP quality Center, Team City, and Jenkins.

I was particularly impressed by the ability to capture the details of what's important. For example, Ranorex can test difficult-to-detect objects where the user choices are random, such as radio buttons or calendar page dates. I found the program's own user interface and test setup somewhat complicated and fussy  but it always delivered the goods.

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